showing first marker when timeline starts

May 15, 2013

Hey there,

I have a problem with markers, hope sb can help:

I have a few markers on my slide and I want that the first marker opens automatically, when the timeline starts.

This would be nice because then the user knows on th first sight, how markers work and that he should hover over or click on them.

Is there a way to do that??

Thanks a lot, best regards!

5 Replies
Christine Hendrickson

Hi there Natalie,

I'm not aware of a way to enable this option using the default settings, however, you could certainly mimic this to appear to be a part of the original initial marker.

Here's how I would do it:

Fill out your marker text in the description area. Right-click on the description and save the content as a picture. You can then insert the new picture and line it up with the original marker. Cut the image from the slide. Select the marker on the slide and edit its states. Create state copy of the "Normal" state and name it "Start". Paste the image you created into the new "Start" state. 

Once your image is in place, you can crop the image so that the original marker on the slide will still pulse or swirl, if you have an animation enabled. For example, I cropped my image from the top down, so it would still appear connected with the original marker.

Save the states and set the initial state of the marker to "Start". When the timeline of the slide starts, the marker will appear expanded. Now, you can add a trigger to change the state of that marker to "Normal" when the user clicks outside of the marker.

Here's a quick example I created:

Marker Example for Natalie

Note that I did change the border for the description, just to make it a little easier to see the differences. 

I'm also attaching the example file, if you'd like to take a look.

Obviously it's nothing fancy, but hopefully this helps!

Ryan Moscoe

I just stumbled on the solution to this issue by accident. I had a marker that was opening automatically and I didn't want that. I'm posting the solution here and in a few other identical threads in case anyone still needs it. If the marker is the first object in the focus order for a slide or slide layer, it opens automatically.